<p>While US News is often used to approximate national prestige (Harvard is also tied with Princeton for first place in that), these rankings are often used to approximate international prestige. </p>
<ol>
<li>Harvard University<br></li>
<li>Massachusetts Institute of Technology<br></li>
<li>University of Cambridge<br></li>
<li>Stanford University<br></li>
<li>University of California, Berkeley<br></li>
<li>University of Oxford<br></li>
<li>Princeton University<br></li>
<li>University of Tokyo<br></li>
<li>University of California, Los Angeles<br></li>
<li>Yale University<br></li>
<li>California Institute of Technology<br></li>
</ol>
<p>I'm surprised Berkeley is ahead of Princeton and Yale.</p>
<p>I was one of the experts they surveyed one year ago. If I remember correctly, they asked me to list top five organizations in my field. Coincidently, four of the five institutes I listed appear in the top five. According to their website, over 20,000 experts (mostly academics) in various fields in the globe were surveyed. The survey appeared quite comprehenisve. It would be interesting if they list the reputation scores in each sub-field. UCLA is just as good as Yale in most of the science fields, if not better. It deserves to be there. The results look pretty reasonable to me, at least for the top 15 institutes.</p>
<p>Global prestige is both ambiguous and unimportant. What value does this ranking even hold besides being cocktail party fodder? Most, if not all, of these schools are research institutions anyways. I feel like much of the “prestige” in this ranking is from how many internationals know of the school, or how much talk there is of the school in the news and media. If there’s a significant amount, the school makes this list…</p>
<p>^But that’s exactly what a “reputation ranking” claims to measure: the recognition and prestige that a given institution holds on the academic world! The extent to which this correlates to whatever aspect you consider to be “important” or “unambiguous” is open to discussion, but the claim that such rankings are all meaningless and have no value besides “cocktail parties fodders” seems to be a thoughtless overgeneralization.</p>
<p>If this is really solely a prestige ranking, there is no way UCLA should be above Yale. And although Berkeley is a great school, it should not be as high as it is</p>
<p>I don’t see any thing wrong here. The reputation of a university is mainly driven by research impact, alumni impact, and quality of faculty, not by average SAT score of the undergraduates. Yale has a better law school, an excellent medical school, and has produced more US presidents and senetors. But Berkeley wins in sciences, engineering, social sciences, and business school. Both are pretty much tied in humanties.
At graduate level, Berkeley can not be matched by Yale.</p>
<p>To those wondering about Berkeley:
There is nothing wrong. Honestly, as a person who comes from a foreign country, I can tell you that, if you ask some regular people on the street about the first US schools that come to their mind, they would say Harvard, Berkeley, Stanford, maybe Princeton. Berkeley is VERY well-known in my country at least and it is better known than most of the Ivy’s, especially Cornell, Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth, UPenn and I would say also Yale and Princeton. Why is that? I don’t know. Maybe they have read more articles which mention its name. :)</p>